The Payne Fund studies of the 1920s and 1930s attempted to discover—with questionable scientific rigor—whether attending the movies was emotionally and physically harmful to children. Was it the case that disturbing scenes and sensory reactions to light and sound caused children to become nervous, agitated, and upset? Although the Payne studies were controversial and inconclusive, they reflected a general concern about the effect of films on children’s well-being that would influence media regulation and discourse for years to come. Many popular and academic conversations about kids and media are still dominated by the belief that children are vulnerable, developing bodies in need of constant oversight. David Buckingham famously defined these discourses as pedagogical and protectionist, and argued that they can limit the study of kids’ media. Like Buckingham, we see potential pitfalls with the pedagogical and protectionist approaches, including regressive views of audiences; arbitrary boundaries between adult and child cultures; and a neglect of formal analysis and historical inquiry. Significant work has been done in a number of disciplines that seeks to address these challenges and concerns, but there is more to add to the film and media studies conversation that recognizes the complexity of children’s media and the cultures surrounding them.

For this issue, The Velvet Light Trap seeks historical and contemporary studies of kids’ media: that is, media aimed exclusively at kids, media produced with kids in mind as part of the larger audience, or media made by kids themselves. Submissions should add to the study of kids’ media as a creative, social, and cultural phenomenon by moving beyond the protectionist and pedagogical binary. We welcome topics that reflect the agency of young people, acknowledge the complexity of these media texts, and expand film and media histories. We will consider papers that concern people under the age of 18—teens, tweens, “young adults,” infants, and everyone in between—and topics with a national, regional, or international scope. The following subjects offer some topic areas, though submissions are not limited to the following:

• Issues of gender, race, and the queering of childhood
• Children as producers of content, online and in film or TV narratives
• New research methodologies: issues when studying kids or using kids as co-researchers
• Merchandising, toy culture, franchising, and paratexts of kids’ media
• Traditional kids’ media forms and genres—fairy tales, animation, fantasy, etc.—and their boundaries and hybridity
• Child stars and the stars of children’s shows or films
• Sites of kid fandom and kids’ fan culture
• Age and age differentiation within the realm of kids’ media
• Texts with crossover appeal to multiple age demographics
• Industrial studies of kid-focused networks, studios, websites, etc.
• Children’s film festivals and other sites of exhibition
• Historiographic inquiries into the conditions affecting children’s media: technological change, taste cultures, distribution and exhibition practices, external censorship, self-regulation, etc.
• Institutional and educational media

Submission Guidelines:

Submissions should be between 8,000 and 10,000 words, formatted in Chicago style. Please submit an electronic copy of the paper, along with a one-page abstract, both saved as a Microsoft Word file. Remove any identifying information so that the submission is suitable for anonymous review. The entire essay, including block quotations and notes, should be double-spaced. Quotations not in English should be accompanied by translations. Photocopies of illustrations are sufficient for initial review, but authors should be prepared to supply camera-ready photographs on request. Illustrations will be sized by the publisher. Permissions are the responsibility of the author.

Send electronic manuscripts and/or any questions to thevelvetlighttrap@gmail.com. Submissions are due September 5, 2015.

A princess (by three-year-old student* with crown drawing help from me).

After my first day in the daycare classroom, I thought I had the kids pegged. Just in the span of an hour, one three-year-old told me all about his Batman pants. A girl wearing a Frozen t-shirt happily informed me of the names Princesses printed onto her front. The pièce de résistance occurred when I drew a copy of a Donald Duck figurine—decked out in his The Three Caballeros poncho and sombrero—and asked the class who it was. “Donald Duck!”In that moment I let my confirmation bias win. It seemed as though gendered merchandizing and Disney market saturation had effectively taken over kids’ media culture. However, with weeks of class time with the kids ahead of me, I had to confront some of my assumptions about kids’ culture and the way we communicate at a young age.

The literature on kids’ media culture is dispersed over disciplines that often fundamentally disagree on the goal of studying young people and the media they interact with. While scholars within our field and outside of it have made key interventions into children’s culture, the focus of popular and academic conversations rests on a binary David Buckingham called protectionist and pedagogical discourses. These two discourses articulate the combination of fear and hope centered on the developing bodies and minds of kids—both the perpetual fear of harm caused by sex and violence and the proactive parent-led curation of educational material to foster “proper” growth.

The problems inherent in this model are numerous—due to classed, gendered, raced, and aged biases—, but the issue I will focus on here is the problem of using an adult bias to talk about kids. I believe that this is a major contributor to the troubling construction of childhood innocence. Speaking from our positions of comparably vast experience, we as adult researchers can underestimate children by assuming that their lack of experience is synonymous with lack of understanding. We also at times see the life of a child as foreign or essentially different than our lives, because of our temporal distance from it. By creating our theses and research questions in isolation from children’s perspectives, we continue to ask questions that center on adults and ignore what children may care about or be interested in.

I’m working on a research initiative led by professor and cartoonist Lynda Barry. The idea is to adapt our research questions for young people (and by young I mean two- to four-year olds) and ask them to weigh in on our questions through drawing. As I mentioned before, the class I visit once a week is made up of two- and three-year olds, an age I find especially fascinating for two reasons. First, because this age group is often ignored by psychological research methods that hinge on repeatable tasks. Apparently toddlers do not typically repeat tasks when ordered (this will come as a huge surprise to parents and caregivers, I’m sure). Second is because they are at the beginning of Disney’s supposed princess target audience (girls age two to six). This “princess obsession” is a loaded one since positive and negative associations with hyper-femininity range across class and taste cultures. With both of the above reasons in mind, I am in the process of crafting research questions and methods with the help of my co-researchers. At this point I hope to share a couple brief observations about creating and interacting with toddlers in a space when they are among their peer group and with adults.

1: Dialogue is generative 

One of Buckingham’s observations is that we can’t take kids’ words at face value. I think we could often say the same for adults, but it is useful to remember that young children do not always have enough experience to know how we want them to respond to specific questions. Our research objective in the classrooms was to get kids to draw and tell us stories about their drawings. What I discovered was that this age group isn’t fond of or especially equipped to synthesizing visual information into stories. When I ask the innocent question “Will you tell me what you drew?” I’d mostly get frank and negative responses, either “I don’t want to,” “No,” or “I don’t know.” I found it much easier to talk with them while they drew. The “stories” were more like conversations, occurring between myself and a child or two. Dialogue moves beyond verbal communication as well. Thanks to Lynda Barry’s insights, my (adult) colleagues and I discovered that discussion through drawing and playing created more insights from kids than standing at the borders and observing.

2: Repetition helps with creation 

Kids* repeating each other’s drawing ideas. Top: “I’m drawing purple and a rainbow.” Bottom: “I’m starting a rainbow.”

Again, I’ve interacted with toddlers one-on-one, but I was surprised to see how much kids will repeat each other while making things. Often I’d get one kid drawing a “horse” that looked more like squiggle marks and then another kid who didn’t know what to draw would suddenly chime in, “I’m drawing a horse.” This helped me learn how to initiate a drawing session by simply stating what I was drawing and see if anyone else would start drawing the same object. At this stage of practice and motor skills, the kids’ ability to create “realistic” images varied wildly, but by saying they were creating the same thing as a friend, they were able to create something.

So, what do we do with experiences like these? I don’t expect these interactions to write my papers for me or even craft my research questions in a direct way. My hope is that if scholars communicate with children through interactive research methods, we may be able to move beyond thinking about what media culture does to kids, and move toward questions and methodologies that respect kids’ media and cultural engagement as nuanced, active, and social.

*Note: drawings are recreations by the author due to IRB restrictions on circulation of original pieces.

“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed.”¹ This internal turmoil is something I experience when I see Animal shouting in a Toyota, Miss Piggy dancing with Taye Diggs, or Gonzo and his chicken friends pretending to be Queen. I have to come clean: I love Disney’s Muppets. Not the Walt Disney Pictures film The Muppets, but the Disney-owned-and-operated franchise featuring the characters formerly known as Jim Henson’s Muppets. Like Elizabeth Bennett and Darcy before me, I didn’t come to love Disney’s Muppets easily. In fact, I was repulsed by this combination of two major childhood brands when I learned about it in 2008. It seemed like an abuse to my memories, and a downright insult to Jim Henson’s legacy. And yet after years of protest, I have fallen in love with the transmedia antics of these characters.

I have been a diehard Jim Henson’s Muppets fan since I can remember. Like so many fans, I learned more about the Muppet texts by re-watching them as I aged. I started to catch the subtle jabs at the Hollywood industry and the implied sexuality of the innocent-seeming characters. In other words, my love deepened as I gained a better understanding of the satirical meanings in the Muppet texts. But I also continued to adore the characters on their own—for their eccentricities as well as their sweetness.

Most first loves end in heartbreak, and such was the case for myself and much of the Muppet audience after Jim Henson died in 1990. After this fateful day, the franchise struggled to maintain its reputation the 1990s—after all, Jim was the primary industry actor and promoter of the brand, in addition to being the founder and leader of the creative team at Jim Henson Productions. The company resorted to adaptations with human leads in The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) and Muppet Treasure Island (1996). I didn’t necessarily think these films were horrible, but my beloved characters seemed diminished and altered playing second fiddle to Michael Caine and Tim Curry. They were no longer the primary draw and Jim Henson Company knew that. The flop that was Muppets from Space (1999) would ultimately prove that a Muppet-centered movie didn’t mean much to audiences anymore. In my mind, the Muppets had had their day. I would continue to console myself with a series of cultural commodities that kept the Muppet characters fresh in my mind. Calendars, magnets, and t-shirts: anything with representations of the Muppets on it worked to soothe my lovesickness.

So when I heard about Disney’s purchase of the franchise in 2004, I was anxious. I didn’t think I could love the post-Jim Henson Muppets. And I definitely could not imagine a world where the crisp, business-savvy, hegemony-bound Disney could recreate the messy, satirical, hippy-dippy Muppets. On the latter point I was partially right. Disney could not revive the Muppets—the success of the initial Muppet franchise died with Jim Henson (if not a few years before). It would have to recreate them in a new, millennial form. But on the former assertion, I was dead wrong. Disney would in fact reawaken my Muppet fandom.

At first I was impervious to the company’s attempts to woo me. The 2009 Christmas special Letters to Santa was saccharine, lackluster, and generally not funny. Anti-Disney diatribes by popular journalists fueled my anger and I let these early prejudices blind me to the possibility of a Disney Muppets reformation.

My cold heart would start to melt in 2009 with the YouTube video “The Muppets: Bohemian Rhapsody.” This award-winning video was part of Disney’s initial Muppet marketing push and it spoke volumes about the company’s plans for the characters. First, it let the Muppets speak, or sing, for themselves. Jim Henson’s very early work—and the work The Muppet Show—very often relied on songs and parodies so that audiences could familiarize themselves with the unknown puppets in a recognized context.  Disney seemed to be taking the same tactic here: reintroducing an “unknown” cast during a well-known song so that the characters could allow their personalities and nuanced expressions to come forward. Of course the video also contained references to past texts and character relationships that rewarded active fans. Second, Disney revealed its own corporate self-consciousness. The video was produced by “Muppets Studio,” an illusive production house under Walt Disney Studios, for a simple reason. Disney knew that the Muppets didn’t fold seamlessly into its family brand. If I was critical of its ownership, Disney was even more self-critical.

The ultimate “Netherfield moment” for me was not Disney’s The Muppets. I was ultimately won over by Miss Piggy’s red carpet appearance at BAFTA after the release of the aforementioned feature. Like “The Muppets: Bohemian Rhapsody,” it let the character Miss Piggy speak for herself, without a rapidly paced plot to push her along. But more importantly, it reminded me how important the Muppet characters were, and are, to people. In the clip below, you see Miss Piggy interact with British and American celebrities, all of whom seem to thoroughly enjoy the exchange. Watching it reminds me of the young children on Sesame Street, hanging on Big Bird’s words and enthusiastically hugging Kermit around his felt neck. People try and kiss her, Jessica Chastain seems overly invested in gaining Miss Piggy’s respect, and some—in particular Tom Hiddleston, Gillian Anderson, and Daniel Radcliffe—simply can’t hide their own fandom. As early as the 1980s, the Muppets had jumped off screen and had become stars in their own right.  So, whether or not this BAFTA dialogues were candid, they worked to reinforce the relevance of the Muppets as celebrities and beloved characters.

I always thought I would remain a Muppet curmudgeon, raving about authenticity and the good ol’ days of Jim Henson Muppet Mania. But it turns out I’m just a fool in love, unable to deny my heart what it wants: more Muppets.

Footnotes:

1. Quoted from Mr. Darcy’s first proposal in Pride and Prejudice